IT was perhaps the most predictable press release of the week. A two-line offering from the Premier League, announcing that clubs would not be obliged to hold a minute’s silence in memory of Baroness Thatcher before games this weekend.

It dropped within hours of her death.

Debate, though, is still raging.

John Madejski and Dave Whelan, chairmen of Reading and Wigan respectively, disagree with the decision.

They, however, stand as lone voices among the footballing community. It is no surprise.

Hours later, Reading announced that there would be a minute’s silence ahead of their game with Liverpool on Saturday, not for Thatcher, but to mark the 24th anniversary of the Hillsborough disaster. It was a decision far smarter than Madejski’s comments.

Make no mistake, football owes Thatcher nothing. Football fans owe her even less. Asking supporters, be they Liverpool, Everton, Millwall or Sunderland, to observe a minute’s silence for a woman who despised them would be insulting, as well as ambitious.

A column in a national newspaper on Tuesday, penned by a respected and experienced sportswriter, suggested Thatcher had “saved the game from tribal hooligans” in the 1980s, and that “in the court of public opinion the majority will come to weigh her achievements more heavily than their grievances.”

Really? Achievements over grievances? In football? Not a chance. Thatcher was no friend of this sport, and no friend of this sport’s people.

Her relationship with football may seem somewhat inconsequential when held up against some of her others. Certainly the sport ranked some way below the IRA, the Trade Unions and the militant socialists within local governments on her hitlist, but it was there nonetheless.

To the hard-nosed Conservative, football, with its working-class roots and its working-class supporters, forever challenging law and order, stretching police resources, was the enemy. Save the game? She would have killed it given half a chance.

She was repulsed by those who followed it, appalled by the hooliganism which had crept into the sport during the 1970s, and which was reaching a high-profile peak during her early years in power.

To her, the problem was not a reflection, and an accurate one at that, of a society that was crumbling, a society that she had, as much as anyone, helped shape and create.

Never has Britain been more divided than under Thatcher. The mantra of “every man for himself” has never rang truer than when the Iron Lady, with her iron heart and her iron fist, was at the helm.

Her attitude to the working class – her destruction of the manufacturing industry, her apparent ignorance of rising social problems, her draconian budget cuts at local level – ripped the heart out of communities, destroyed families, created major social issues which still exist to this day, often in amplified form.

But no, to her this was football’s problem. And it was up to her to stop it. One of her more radical proposals was an Orwellian-style ID-card system for football supporters, with prison sentences and heavy fines for those who did not conform. Her distaste for the game, and its fans, was genuine, and it ran deep.

The people of Liverpool, of course, know this better than most.

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Thatcher’s relationship with this city was, at best, one of mutual contempt.

“A city possessed with a particularly violent nature,” was how she described Liverpool after the Heysel disaster in 1985. She meant it.

Having watched with horror the Toxteth riots of 1981, yet never appreciated the root cause of such issues, she pigeon-holed the city as an enemy within, a violent problem child, undeserving of support or sympathy.

Fighting, to her, was to be done only against third-world military “powers” such as Argentina, not against an oppressive police force within the chronically imbalanced, under-supported cities her Government presided over.

This blinkered view of Liverpool, and of football supporters, working-class people, generally, was never more evident than in the aftermath of Hillsborough.

Thatcher’s precise role in the disaster, and the cover-up which followed, remains unclear. Last year’s revelations from the Hillsborough Independent Panel did not, as some had hoped, blow the lid off the Prime Minister’s involvement.

What is known, however, is that she was told in a memo that Lord Justice Taylor’s interim report into the disaster found the chief superintendent in charge at Hillsborough “behaved in an indecisive fashion” and senior officers infuriated the judge by seeking to “duck all responsibility when giving evidence” to his inquiry.

She was also told, to her horror, that Douglas Hurd, the then Home Secretary, planned to “welcome the broad thrust” of Taylor’s findings.

Her response spoke volumes. It also explains why this city will never forgive, never forget, why nobody in Liverpool mourned this week, and why Elvis Costello was the soundtrack of choice in more than a few Merseyside households these past few days.

“What do we mean by ‘welcoming the broad thrust of the report?’,” she wrote. “The broad thrust is devastating criticism of the police. Is that for us to welcome? Surely we welcome the thoroughness of the report and its recommendations? – M.T.”

So whilst the right, the rich and the establishment may mourn her loss, for Liverpool Thatcher’s passing serves only to remind of some of this city’s darkest hours.

It may not be the most constructive thing in the world, but football fans, particularly Liverpool’s, have every reason to bear a grudge. If compassion has been in short supply since her death, is it any wonder? The Britain Thatcher created treated selfishness as a virtue, compassion and empathy were afterthoughts. Tears showed only weakness.

Don’t speak ill of the dead? Fine. I agree. Sort of. I wouldn’t like to see anyone “tramping the dirt down” on my mother’s grave.

But then I wouldn’t expect you all to pretend she was something she wasn’t, either.

REGULAR columnist David Prentice is away on holiday and back next week.